29th November AHRC ICT Methods Network Seminar 1

Sustainability Issues for e-Infrastructure Services in Arts and Humanities

Rob Procterrob.procter@ncess.ac.uk

www.ncess.ac.uk

29th November AHRC ICT Methods Network Seminar 2

NCeSS Overview Launched in May 2004 to develop

and promote UK e-Social Science. Unified Centre with distributed

structure:– Co-ordinating Hub: Manchester & UKDA – Seven research Nodes located across

UK– Twelve small projects

29th November AHRC ICT Methods Network Seminar 3

NCeSS Aims and Objectives

Applications of e-Social Science:– Tackling substantive research problems by

enhancing existing research methods and encouraging new approaches

Social shaping of e-Science:– Usability of tools and infrastructure– Socio-technical factors in the design, uptake

and use of e-Science• eSI theme

– Drivers, policy and socio-economic impacts Create sustainable digital resources

29th November AHRC ICT Methods Network Seminar 4

Digital Resources in a Grid World The emergence of a new kind of research infrastructure is

helping to redefine what we mean by digital resources. These new infrastructures are distinctive in being ‘service

oriented’. They support all the types of digital resources with which

we are familiar plus a new kind: the service. A service is a resource which performs some useful

function, for example, processing data. The provision of metadata enables these services and

other kinds of resources to be discovered used, including being composed (perhaps automatically) to carry out complex processing and analysis tasks for users.

What kinds of sustainability issues does this raise for digital resources and how can they be tackled?

I will briefly consider these questions from two distinct levels:– European and UK programmes– User communities

29th November AHRC ICT Methods Network Seminar 5

European e-Infrastructure Sustainability Strategy

The role of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures is to support a coherent approach to policy-making in Europe and to act as an incubator for international negotiations about specific initiatives.

ESFRI has prepared a European Roadmap for new research infrastructures of pan-European interest:– In A+H, this involves:

• DARIAH• CLARIN

Some ESFRI principles:– Existing e-Infrastructure projects to be superseded by integrated

sustainable services at national and European levels.– e-Infrastructures to be application neutral and open to all user

communities and resource providers.– National funding agencies to fund multidisciplinary & inclusive

infrastructures (rather than disciplinary specific alternatives).– FP7 to facilitate a model which specifically encourages further

integration of national e-Infrastructure initiatives.

29th November AHRC ICT Methods Network Seminar 6

Principles for a Sustainable National e-Infrastructure The UK e-Science programme has been very successful in promoting

innovation in research, but the project orientation of the programme has meant that sustainability has often been overlooked.

This situation is changing and some principles for sustainability of infrastructure and services have now been defined:

– A secure national framework for multiple levels of authentication and authorisation to support both individual institutions and dynamic, cross boundary, ‘Virtual Organisations’.

– A repository for open source, open standard infrastructure middleware and tools as well as a software engineering capability to research, support and maintain this.

– A national focus for digital curation providing support, guidance and research into long-term preservation of both research data and traditional publications.

– Integrated access to national data sets and publications such as those provided through AHDS, ESDS, EDINA, MIMAS and British Library; and emerging Open Access subject and institutional repositories.

– Resource discovery mechanisms enabling intelligent searches across the ever-expanding mass of digital resources of all types.

– A set of national services for data and long-term data archiving. – A national centre to enhance the creation of a strong culture of multidisciplinary

research and provide training in new technologies. – Development of tools and services to support collaborative environments,

including portals for access to data and services, national service registries, and workflow and provenance tools.

– An ongoing relationship with industry to ensure sustainability into the future. Some elements of this strategy, such as the Digital Curation centre are

now in place.

29th November AHRC ICT Methods Network Seminar 7

Digital Curation Centre

Actions needed to maintain and utilise digital resources over entire life-cycle:– For current and future generations of users.

Digital Preservation:– Long-run technological/legal accessibility and

usability. Data curation in science:

– Maintenance of body of trusted data to represent current state of knowledge in area of research.

Research in tools and technologies:– Integration, annotation, provenance, metadata,

security.

29th November AHRC ICT Methods Network Seminar 8

Sustainability and the Community In a world of proliferating digital resources – data, training

materials, services – how do we ensure the effort required to sustain them is available?– Current methods for communicating and managing the stock of

knowledge don’t scale with knowledge growth. One possible solution is for wider community involvement to

support the maintenance and evolution of digital resources. In particular, this means continual effort to keep metadata up-to-

date so that digital resources remain discoverable and useful:– Organising concepts are dynamic and often contested.– Resources are often of variable quality: as one researcher put it “We

need an Amazon for datasets.” How is the proliferation problem being dealt with outside

academia?– wikipedia, flickr, myspace, youtube, del.icio.us, etc., are examples of

the use of folksonomies and social tagging. A folksonomy consists of collaboratively generated, open-ended

labels that categorize content. A folksonomy is most notably contrasted with a more formal

taxonomy or ontology in that authors of the labeling system are often the main users of the content to which labels are applied.

29th November AHRC ICT Methods Network Seminar 9

29th November AHRC ICT Methods Network Seminar 10

29th November AHRC ICT Methods Network Seminar 11

29th November AHRC ICT Methods Network Seminar 12

29th November AHRC ICT Methods Network Seminar 13

Linking Ontologies and Folksonomies Formal approaches to metadata support such as ontologies are

not amenable to being easily evolved because they are cumbersome and require technical expertise.

Informal approaches are such as folksonomies are easy to use but vulnerable to quality control problems.

Perhaps a combination of ontologies and folksonomies can deliver low entry costs, a rich vocabulary that is broadly shared and comprehensible by the user base, and the capacity to respond quickly to language change – without the errors that inevitably arise in naive, unsupervised folksonomies.

The NCeSS PolicyGrid node (Aberdeen University) is exploring “folktology” solutions which exploit both lightweight ontology and folksonomy based approaches:– Squanto (Semantic QUalitative ANnotation TOol) is a Grid-enabled

qualitative analysis tool which allows researchers to code text documents using both free text codes and so-called structured codes (derived from an OWL ontology).

Squanto allows users to create lightweight relations between free codes and structured codes, leading to related resources being highlighted through this association.

See http://www.ncess.ac.uk/research/nodes/PolicyGrid/ for more information.

29th November AHRC ICT Methods Network Seminar 14

PolicyGrid

Exploring how Semantic Grid tools can support social scientists and policy makers using mixed-methods:– Surveys and interviews, ethnography, case studies,

simulations Provision of metadata infrastructure in this

context presents challenges:– Dynamic and contested nature of concepts within social

sciences– Need to align with existing thesauri (where those exist)

and need to support open, community based efforts PolicyGrid is exploring “folktology” solutions which

exploit both lightweight ontology and folksonomy (social tagging) based approaches.

29th November AHRC ICT Methods Network Seminar 15

Finally …

Achieving community engagement in sustainability is not just a matter of having the right tools.

Is it realistic to expect community-based effort in a research culture where the people associated with digital resource creation (and maintenance) don’t get credit for it?

How can we change this?